Phasers on Stunned

I appear to have broken one of my friends, a colleague and a co-writer!

I've been pretty quiet this week because I've been working really hard on a conference paper (and hopefully journal article). The conference is on The Politics and Law of Doctor Who: its energetic progenitor Danny Nicol has even set up a blog well in advance to kick ideas around outside the closed circle of academia, which is the kind of thing that makes me happy.

I've been thinking for ages that I should put my interest in popular culture and science fiction to good (academic) use rather than treating it as a private pleasure. The geeks have seemingly inherited the earth, looking through cinema and TV listings, so it's not as if SF is a guilty pleasure any more (the extended version of this rant is very similar to the defence of Media and Cultural Studies I will deliver at the drop of a hat).

So anyway, this conference seemed like an ideal opportunity. I toddled off to my esteemed colleague who works extensively in pop culture (particularly serial killers, pornography, 'underground' fiction, comics and so on) because I knew he'd love to have a go at this. Cue months of wading through the oceans of material he found: production notes, spin-off novels and comics, scripts, the lot. Eventually, we picked one Who seven-part adventure ('Inferno')* and a single Trek episode, 'Mirror, Mirror'.** They're both about dangerous searches for energy sources, both feature mirror universes and both appeared on TV in Britain at exactly the same time: 'Mirror, Mirror' aired in the same week as the last episode of 'Inferno'. Who could resist?





'Mirror, Mirror' is famous as the origin of the science fiction trope Beard of Evil, because Spock in the Evil universe has a goatee so you can tell them apart:

In actual fact, Beardy Spock isn't evil, he just behaves cruelly because that's the logical thing to do in a cruel universe. It does mean that Evil Kirk gets to utter the immortal line 'Has the Galaxy gone crazy? Where's your beard?'.

By an amazing coincidence, 'Inferno' also uses facial hair and features to differentiate mirrored characters. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (uptight but decent old stick) has a military moustache. His evil counterpart Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart has no moustache but does have a scar and an eyepatch.

Nasty

Nice

So that's the aesthetics sorted out. What we're interested in is how these popular SF TV shows constructed their 'ideal' politics by representing an 'evil' mirror.*** Bearing in mind that they were made in the late 60s and early 70s, it's interesting that they don't choose Communism. Instead, 'Mirror, Mirror' depicts a piratical world of violent oppression by an Empire, while 'Inferno' chooses a fascist regime, albeit one with Orwellian Stalinist overtones mixed in with a general Nazi atmosphere. So what we think is that both shows avoid criticism of the political cultures which generated them by presenting horrific regimes which some viewers may find resemble states against which they actually fought. 

All seems quite simple. And then I decided that Foucault would be useful here, and I went back to Discipline and Punish, adding 'Technologies of the Self' to the mix. That led me to Kant and the Federation's slightly confused invocation of the categorical imperative, and before long I'd generated 100 pages of notes which seemed to suggest that the Empire (which applies an Agoniser to incompetent crew members) and the Republic (which practises summary execution) are far less oppressive than Who's normal Britain and the Federation, because the Empire doesn't give a damn what you think as long as you do what you're told (and makes you carry around an Agoniser that superior officers use on you when you're not performing up to scratch), whereas the Federation has ways (philosophical 'technologies') to make you love it. It doesn't need to torture you because you've internalised its values and spend your time worrying about whether you've lived up to them in your daily life (hence the importance of the Captain's Log): you govern yourself and become a subject by examining yourself for signs of deviation. The conclusion is that the Doctor's preferred England deserves to survive because it has room for sexiness and intellectual flexibility, whereas the fascist Republic gets blown up because the mad scientist and his party friends are too rigid to admit they need help (and sex). Star Trek's Empire will probably fall or be reformed for the same reasons, with a little help from Not Actually Evil Spock once the 'good' Kirk points out the logic of not committing genocide while giving him a device allowing him to murder his way to the top of the Empire. The Federation, I feel, is a little smug in the way that hegemonic American culture tends to be: I like Doctor Who's rather English assumption that bumbling along without having to be absolutely right all the time is probably the best way to go. Foucault disagrees: he thinks that 'tolerant liberal' states are just subtler at turning individuals into tools of state continuation. 

My colleague thinks this is a slightly fascistic argument, but I'm sticking to the line that it's radically poststructuralist. I've just sent him a largely incoherent and obsessive cowpat of this argument and he's got to a) hack a 20 minute presentation out of it and b) cross out all the bits he thinks are bollocks. The good outcome of all this is that he can't do it tomorrow so I have a day off. The down side is that I've just remembered that rather than go for a long bike ride, I'm going to a funeral instead. 

But when anyone asks me what I do, I can quite truthfully say that students' massive debts pay me to work out what French poststructuralist philosophy has to say about 1970s Saturday evening TV. It's a hard job, but someone's got to do it. 

* That's a link to the Tardis Data Core because I love the fact that there's a whole Wikipedia just for Doctor Who. No lives have been wasted doing that at all.  

** And that's a link to the Star Trek equivalent of Wikipedia, Memory Alpha. It's a hell of a lot bigger than the Data Core too (and one day will outstrip Wikipedia because frankly a lot of knowledgeable men care a lot more about SF shows than they do about the rest of our achievements as a species. 

***'Inferno' also has some rubbish monsters called Primords but they make absolutely no narrative sense at all, so we've decided to ignore them. 

I Got Off My Bike And Stopped Looking For Work

Down Under, one of the academics I respect most of all is having a very nasty encounter with cancer. Unlike I would in such a situation, she's not rocking backwards and forwards in a darkened room uttering incoherent moans of terror (I would also be looking at the room of unread books and thinking 'that was a waste of money and time then'). She's thinking about the academic life and how it fits into social and institutional structures, particularly the way we all overwork.  

I know why I overwork: to make up in quantity what I lack in quality; because so many of our activities aren't following orders but help colleagues who are usually our friends too; because a student in need isn't someone you can ignore because time's up. A dentist doesn't clock off half way through a root canal because it's 5 o'clock, and nor can we. Also, a lot of our work is also pleasure. After a day's admin, it's actually fun to read some Foucault or scribble down some ideas for a paper. I think I got through my degree because study didn't feel like work (unlike the student who told me that she hates my Ethics module because it makes her think).

Kate's insight into why academics overwork (yes, we do) is that it's more than a personal act. She uses the fascinating comparison of pro-cycling. Being a fat cyclist myself, I initially thought that was a good thing, but I was wrong. From Coyle and Hamilton's book, she learned that:

To ride within the limits of your own ability became naive, disloyal to the team, and uncompetitive. Young riders waited to be invited to join the inner circle who were doping, and accepted pills handed to them on the basis that it would make them healthier; team management understood and allowed this to happen, because results had become the currency for economic survival, not just for individual riders, but for vast whirling enterprises of sponsorship, employment and profit.

For pro cyclists, being good wasn't enough because professional sport very much isn't about the taking part. It's about winning, and not for the sake of winning. Pro-sport is simply a complicated form of advertising. Teams need sponsors and advertisers need eye-catching sites for their logos, whether that's an F1 car or a cyclist's arse. Enormous profits and losses depended on whether a cyclist performed. Capitalism made Lance Armstrong dope, not simply individual greed.

That's the important point about Coyle's and Kate's point. I have my perceived reasons for overworking, but that's far less important than the culture and structure within which I operate. In a Foucauldian sense, I've simply internalised the disciplinary and surveillance models which surround me. I feel bad when I don't overwork because I've been trained to see overwork as normal. Our employers – and every employer: this isn't simply about education – depend on overwork. Our classes are bigger than is educationally optimal. Marking is more rushed than it should be. Holidays, when taken, actually become opportunities to do the marking in exotic new places or the time when new books are read. We have less time to keep up with the field, less time with individual students or small groups, less time to think about each student's development, less time to talk about colleagues' ideas: I've been trying to find time to read a colleague's paper on the politics and culture of the Youth Hostel Association for weeks, despite knowing that it's going to be fascinating. I couldn't hang around after today's 2 hour sonnets class to chat to students about their work in general because I had another 3 hour class to go to elsewhere. Colleagues aren't going to each others' research seminars because less important but more immediate demands are being made on their time.

Kate puts it like this:

Imagine that the university offered to pay salary X, but in any given pay week, multipliers applied to X on the basis of worker need in the moment. Imagine that your employer could hike up your rate of pay on demand like this, without any need for forward planning or budgetary calculations. Oh, you need more cash this week? Sure. How much more?

Because this is exactly what university workers offer in return. It’s Thursday and you need this report by Monday but I’m already in meetings or teaching all day Friday and grading on Saturday? Sure, I can offer Sunday, would that do? And of course, I’ll spend most of Saturday night thinking about it because I’ll be at a Christmas concert for my kids so I’ll have some mental calculation time and could check an updated version if you email it to me, provided I’m sitting up the back. So yes, we can meet on Monday and you’ll have your report, because I ride for the team. Obviously, if I wasn’t doing your report I’d be trying to meet a publication deadline, so I’ve already more or less paid my weekend up front anyway, as a downpayment on something or other. Don’t worry about the publication though, I’ll make that up next weekend.

It's true. Our work seems important to us, and we obliged to fulfil a lot of it not because of the money, but because we exist in a social web we don't want to break. I'm currently meant to be working to contract as part of my union's industrial action, so I'm meant to be doing 37.5 hours per week and not taking on any extra duties. But research is fun; I like my students and don't want to inconvenience them; X is my friend as well as my boss so I don't want to say no to him/her; this thing's really important, what if everybody says no?. The result is that working-to-rule is painful and divisive, however right. The pressures are the same in any job, but the situation is special in a sense: because there's less division between work and non-work (we're less alienated, in Marxist terms), it's harder to resist. Someone making things can stop at the end of the shift and can't make more of them at home. Because academic work often doesn't involve machinery or infrastructure, it can be done anytime, anywhere - and so it is.

So we all internalise the pressure to overwork, and feel bad if we don't. This is ideal for our employers. They like the fact that there are thousands of desperate PhDs out there looking for whatever hours they can scrape together. They like the fact that our consciences ensure that the work is done, however intolerable the pressure. They like outsourcing their requirements to our sense of responsibility. It gets the work done without having to spend any money.

There are a couple of downsides. Firstly: who will be the academic who refuses to take the steroids? Who declines on quality of life or quality of work grounds? That person will be pilloried by management as 'not a team player' and envied by colleagues for their selfishness. But overwork isn't only personally destructive: it forces everyone else to compete. Nobody wants to let their students and colleagues down, so (with some exceptions) we all overwork just to keep the ship afloat.

And here's the kicker: the more we overwork, the less we get paid.

For 5 years, our pay has gone up by 1%, which is significantly less than inflation, so we're back to 2008 real-terms salaries. The university intends to keep doing this for the next few years too. I sit in Board of Governors meetings and listen to everyone acknowledge that we're doing more for less, but I never hear anyone admit that we're making things worse. If we stopped overworking, those hungry PhDs would get decent jobs. We'd know our students' names and how they're getting on. Our lectures would improve. We'd write fewer, better books and journal articles because quality would once again trump quantity. Our loved ones would talk to us again rather than enduring apoplectic rants about work followed by an immediate and unromantic collapse into catatonia.

Where does it stop? No one university can get off the bus because the government's trying to organise private-sector providers who'll dump the expensive stuff (research, libraries, qualified staff) in favour of cash-and-carry courses, which is like a country voluntarily putting on the dunce's cap. No, it's much easier for a university to pass the pressure downwards and let us deal with – and worry – about it individually. But here's the thing: because the pressure is intangible and entirely absent from directives, reports and reviews, it's also non-existent. I couldn't point to a single piece of paper telling me to mark harder or do more. It's so diffuse that it's completely deniable, and as Foucault points out about Bentham's Panopticon, it doesn't even need a hierarchy. We'll behave as if they're watching even when they aren't watching. That's the point of hegemony: it doesn't need force or even explicit enunciation.

Kate found this all out the hard way: she couldn't find time for a health check with the result that her cancer was detected later than it should have been. Her choice, you might say, but the point of being a poststructuralist scholar is that we know that nobody operates in a void: we do things within structures and cultures, whether we're aware of them or not.

Take the evening off. Not for your sakes, but for your students and your colleagues. And for Kate.

*The title of the post references Conservative politician Norman Tebbit, who in the depths of a terrible economic crash, claimed that mass unemployment was due to laziness. He said: 'I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it'. Which is so economically illiterate that he should have been beaten to death with a copy of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

Pointless round-up of reckons

Good afternoon from the Midlands! The sun's shining, enough colleagues are back for the first collective moan of the new academic year, I've been for a swim and I'm not doing Clearing until tomorrow. Some books have arrived and I'm now in possession of an iPad, for which I'll find a use at some point: it'll be easier to carry round for lectures than toting the MacBook at the very least.

This week's books are the Broken Homes, the latest in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London police procedural-fantasy series which was very enjoyable; Peter Heller's interesting-looking post-apocalypse novel The Dog Stars (acclaimed by Oprah, Playboy and the Wall Street Journal, so I'm more interested than convinced), John Niven's Straight White Male which will no doubt be scabrously satirical (and this one features a burned-out writer consigned to a Midlands university); B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates which as you know comes as a series of bundles in a box to be read in any order,

B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates

and finally Ceri Jones's Dweud eich Dweud, which is a guide to colloquial and idiomatic Welsh. Basically, it'll help me curse convincingly in yr hen iaith. Though if you're from Caernarfon, all you need is 'Shw mae, gont?' anyway. As Caliban says in The Tempest,
You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language.

So all in all, a good day. I will get back to Serious Academic Texts shortly, but there's no rush. I can't do anything substantial in the Clearing call centre anyway. Yesterday we chatted about all sorts of interesting research they're doing in between gossiping, and I came away with a whole other list of books to read, particularly Northern Irish Troubles novels.

The other excitement of the day was my colleague Alan doing an interview about a forthcoming TV series, Peaky Blinders, which picks up on Birmingham's gang history to present a local and richly-accented version of Gangs of New York.



Meanwhile, here's a comedic version of Michael Gove's vision of history, courtesy of Fry and Laurie:



and a bit of academic humour for you Foucauldians:

Just one Sonnetto, give it to me…

Afternoon all. And what time do I call this?

In my defence, I've been teaching for several hours without a break. The first session was with the English literature second-years, on the Renaissance module. Which makes me the Renaissance Man. Ahem. It was a session on sonnets today: a strict form subgenre requiring technical mastery while also avoiding cliché and predictability. There are a lot of bad sonnets around.

What I did to avoid the dreaded silence and passivity which often manifests itself when teaching poetry and in particular closed form poetry was to introduce scissors to the occasion. I gave them sonnets by Wyatt, Drayton, Spenser and Wendy Cope, but with all the lines in random order. The students had to draw on their knowledge of metre, rhyme scheme, quatrains, octaves, sestets and 'voltas' (the surprising 'turn'), sonnet history and culture to work out the correct order. So they had to develop technical and cultural skills to get it right. They did really well, some perfectly.

After that, it was into my Ethics class, mostly concentrating on the origins, meaning and application of privacy. Rather economically, I thought, I discussed the Renaissance development of the individual just as I had in the sonnets class! Individuality is a culturally and historically-located concept, owing a lot to the Reformation's insistence on private contemplation and moral self-interrogation. Add capitalism's self-defeating but lucrative need for you to express this new 'you' by constantly changing your outward appearance (new codpiece then, new iPhone now) and voilà: the self-fashioned individual. And individuals need physical and mental space. Which corporations and governments need for economic reasons but resent for political purposes. So we went from John Locke to Facebook's privacy settings in a single bound. Hugely enjoyable, though I was rather shocked by many students' cheerful willingness to abandon privacy for the sake of convenience. Facebook's business model (sell your data to other corporations) seems perfectly reasonable, apparently.

The point was that just as in the Renaissance, we self-fashion, only we do so in multiple forums now. We have to perform in person, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Blogger and everywhere else. Paradoxically, we perform both to conform and to distinguish ourselves. My Twitter feed tries to be trenchant and witty, to attract followers. But I can't be too creative or transgressive, because I'll be socially excluded. Learning where the boundaries are is what Foucault called disciplinarily – and its bound up with notions of the self and of power. Being visible online is an exercise in agency, but it's also a form of submitting to authority and surveillance both by the state and corporations, but also to the population which has internalised hegemonic values. We are each other's, and our own, policemen.

All in all, a glorious, though exhausting day. And being in the classroom meant I was temporarily shielded from the vicious, ideologically-driven government financial statement.

P-P-P-P-Pick up a Penguin!

I'v just received six books from the Penguin Great Ideas series - 80 (so far) short books of essays by prominent intellectuals. I already owned Marcus Aurelius's Meditations in this edition, and I've added Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Orwell's Books v. Cigarettes, Why I Write and Decline of the English Murder, William Morris's Useful Work v. Useless Toil, and Michel Foucault's The Spectacle of the Scaffold.

To be honest, I've got most of these texts in one form or another, and most are available for free on the web (follow the links above). I bought them because these slim volumes are masterpieces of book design. Each one evokes the spirit and sense of the text: the Foucault features repetitive circles representing the atomised individual under the microscope of social institutions.

Why I Write features a spare, plain cover with an austere typeface reflecting Orwell's suspicion of rhetoric.

The Morris merges art and craft in line with his philosophy that anything which is useful is necessarily beautiful (he clearly never worked in the lower reaches of higher education).

The Decline of the English Murder is a deeply embossed tabloid newspaper, complete with adverts,

Books v. Cigarettes has an abstract design which reminds me of ashtrays and Venn diagrams, from the 1950s/1960s designs:

while Benjamin's essay, which is about what happens to our definitions of art when artworks can be reproduced to infinity, features the spine of the book repeated over and over again, which I think is very witty.

Penguins were invented in 1935 by Allen Lane (influenced by various other imprints) to make high quality books available for about the price of a packet of cigarettes. Design and typography were hugely important to the company, for themselves and as a way of distinguishing the texts from other cheap books. You can still buy the originals for pennies everywhere: green for detective novels, blue for biography, orange for fiction and so on. Even if you can't read, they do furnish a room!

Room meat

I nicked the phrase from In The Loop. It's the practice of stuffing a meeting with extra bodies to make the principals feel valued.

I've had a very bad day. Apart from a swim at 8.30 (a minute slower than usual), I've co-organised a big union meeting and took the minutes (more stuff to type up), and attended another soul-sapping departmental meeting. At least the union meeting brought us some militant joy - motion for holding a ballot to call for the V-C's resignation passed nem con. The departmental meeting was Foucauldian - all these brilliant teachers and scholars forced to spend an hour and a half trying to work out the intentions and mistakes of a management class which has zero interest in students or our own wellbeing. Fatuous, flaky ideas become fact, as we collude in deskilling ourselves and undereducating our students, despite being able to spot the gaping flaws a mile off. Nobody in that room wants to be a bureaucrat, nobody wants to dumb down our courses, yet a management knife is being held at our throats.

However, it's 4.45: time, finally, to get down to some actual academic work, and prepare the Shakespeare lecture. How wonderful it would be to have the time to read widely and prepare well in advance, then circulate it to the support staff with plenty of time. But no - late and rushed is the way the university appears to want it. It's just such as shame that I'm prevented from doing my best - why should the students?

The hectic pace of the suave lecturer-about-town

Another full day. Fencing last night was brutally effective, so I'm feeling the bruises. Today I'm reading lots of third-year project work, and other student writing, going to a seminar on Foucault, PR and concepts of professionalism, then teaching, then coaching, then home for my housemate's 25th birthday party, complete with DJ. As they're all sophisticated continental types, the DJ will go on until 6 a.m - and I have to teach tomorrow. Oh dear, I sound like a tired old man. There's a party for other sophisticated continental types tomorrow as well…